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I have had a steady drip of requests since the Palm Pre launched for a webOS version of our software. I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the platform, what I think Palm is doing right and wrong, and relate that to our own software products FastFigures and powerOne.

First, let me say that I like what Palm is doing with the Pre from a developer perspective except one major flaw. A year ago I wrote a post on the recipe for beating Apple and highlighted three things that the company needed to do. Palm has nailed two of the three:

Build a beautiful, touchscreen device.

Make it synchronize with web-based applications.

Focus on offline use of web-based applications.

Palm is flubbing #3.

Palm has built their platform so that all applications are written in CSS (the page style), HTML (the content) and Javascript (the interactivity), the core languages of the web. But these three languages are intended to handle the user interface, or client, side of the equation.

What’s missing — and what Palm insists it doesn’t need — is the underlying technology that handles the business-side of web applications. Developers use a multitude of server-side technologies to do this, including Ruby on Rails, PHP, .net, and Python. Most mobile platforms use either C or Java to handle the business logic.

Palm insists it doesn’t need anything. And this is a major mistake.

Our software requires the business language to run the engine that performs all the calculations. Javascript won’t do primarily because of security and speed issues. In addition, insisting on using Javascript for business logic flies in the face of everything I learned about how to do web development.

Palm’s perspective is that applications that need business logic should interface with the web, such as Google’s search engine. Except an application like ours works best when the calculation is resident on the device, not because the calculations are better but because our customers don’t trust the Internet connection with their devices. There are just too many holes.

So what do our customers do when it comes to the Pre? They can either use the Classic emulator, which we don’t officially support but seems to run our software without a problem according to customers who have tried it, or use the web-based version of FastFigures at http://www.fastfigures.com/mobile. Either way, if you want our products on Pre, please drop us an email so we know.

And hopefully in the future, Palm will realize their mistake and give us a business logic language to work with. For now, though, I won’t hold my breath.

When I started in this business 12 years ago, there was tried-and-true consumer price points: $9.99, $19.99, $29.99, $49.99, $99.99. Only a few apps — Microsoft Office, Adobe Photo suites come to mind — were able to price above those levels. Anything under $19.99 was considered an impulse buy and anything above $49.99 was considered professional quality.

This never was in the mobile/smartphone/PDA world. In this world pricing seemed to break down as $10, $15, $20, $29.99, and $39.99. Only the rare app was able to get more. We charged $59.99 for powerOne Finance but bundled both the Palm OS and Windows Mobile version together for that price. If we had been in the old model of consumer pricing, we would have been between $100 and $200 (with slightly different presentation and functionality). Impulse buy was anything less than $15; professional apps were at $29.99 and above.

Now those prices have morphed again, at least for iPhone. For whatever reason — first products in the AppStore, lack of trials, single purchasing location, Apple’s devious plan, natural laws of commoditization, Chris Anderson (just kidding) — all pricing have depressed even further. It seems that the new scale is $0.99, $1.99, $2.99, $3.99 and $4.99. Only the rare app can charge more.

The interesting thing to me is that the mentality hasn’t changed. Now, $0.99 is an impulse buy and $4.99 denotes professional quality.

Case in point: In April, a competitor was at $5.99 then $4.99 then $3.99. Never really impacted FastFigures’ sales, but we could never catch up with him, either. For a week, he went free. When he went free our sales shot through the roof. When he came back to the paid side at $3.99 he made no headway. It didn’t impact my sales at all (I was way ahead of him in Top Paid) and the same was true when he dropped to $0.99. He sold a lot more, catapulted above me in Top Paid, but it didn’t impact my sales. Only when he went back to $3.99 did my sales start to fall off as I was clearly losing units to him and he was able to stay ahead of me in Top Paid.

One conclusion: Top Paid position has a clear impact on sales. I think most people try the 1) cheapest and 2) first found product that they were looking for.

Price, though, also impacts sales. So where’s this cut-off point that attracts the alternative, professional customer we were looking for? Is the connotation that anything under $0.99 is a throw-away app? Or is that point $1.99 or $2.99? Clearly, $3.99 has a different connotation but I’m curious if that “professional level” actually falls in somewhere lower.

Or is my entire theory flawed, and the reality is that software is diving toward $0 price points, as my Building an iPhone Business surmises? I can definitely say the market is shifting. And I don’t believe, unlike other developers, that it’s Apple’s fault. I think they are just accelerating the curve.

To paraphrase President Kennedy: Ich bin ein Marketer. It’s not that I don’t care greatly about the product and features and it’s not that I’m not heavily investing my time in developing product. It’s that, in the past few months, I have come to understand my customers better than I ever have before. For the first time I understand WHY they use our powerOne and FastFigures products, not just WHAT they use them for. And this, my friends, makes me a marketer.

Figuring this out is really hard. I know. I spent years struggling with it.

If you follow Infinity Softworks then you know we have distributed some 15 million units, through bundling and sales, in our 12 year history. We gave away a low functioning product to sell a high functioning product. powerOne Finance, RRE and CRE, our three for-sale products focused on financial and real estate markets, were used to run calculation in the field. This is WHAT it did. But it took me a decade to figure out WHY these finance, real estate, investing and business customers used the products. The WHY is because it gave them credibility with their clients and co-workers. They are paid to have answers, to lend their expertise to a situation, and powerOne gave that to them, very quickly, everywhere and at their fingertips.

If I would have understood this, I could have developed the capabilities around the product to do even a better job of solving this product. Understanding WHY would drive every decision we would have made. And seeing opportunities in that light would have been a litmus test to decide whether we should pursue them or not. We could have also utilized this to develop other products that solved the same core problem.

I obviously didn’t understand this as our next move was to develop powerOne Graph. powerOne Graph was primarily focused on the scientific community, whose main constituents are in education. powerOne Graph answers the WHAT question perfectly: run calculations in the field. But the WHY for education is completely different then the WHY for business and finance. Education WHY was to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the subject matter. Completely different then the WHY for our financial products.

It’s that un-ending focus on solving the customers WHY that builds world-class products and companies. I hope to stay true to the WHY this time around.

I’m very proud to announce the release of FastFigures Mobile, our first iPhone/iPod Touch application and the first release of our companion to FastFigures Online. FastFigures Mobile runs on iPhone and iPod Touch devices without requiring an Internet connection. FastFigures modernizes the calculator.

In my time running Infinity Softworks, there have been three defining products. The first was FCPlus Professional version 2, which came out in 1999. This product really introduced the template format to mainstream financial calculator users, making it possible for them to drop their HP-12c and HP-17b and carry a Palm handheld instead. This product was also a great marketing success for us as its younger sibling, FCPlus, was the first of our products bundled with Palm handhelds. We had product bundled on pretty much every Palm OS handheld from that point on, including Sony and other Palm OS manufacturers. During this time, bundling became our main marketing strategy.

The next defining product was powerOne Graph version 4, a full-fledged software graphing calculator for Palm OS devices. This was our key product to go after the education market. Educators loved it because their students weren’t spending their entire class time trying to remember which buttons to press and students loved it because they got to carry around a computer. Our education efforts, unfortunately, didn’t work out so well for us. Our three years of effort were killed off when Palm decided to exit handheld computers.

FastFigures is our third defining product. It revives the vision I had for the company’s products in 1999. Calculation is an integral part of many of our lives. We use it to calculate mortgages and investments and concrete slab materials and IV drips and pressure conversions and … well, you get the idea. And we all have our own specialities and needs, independent from everyone around us. But we don’t just run calculations. We need to retain results and share them with co-workers and clients. And we need to be able to run these numbers everywhere and recall these results everywhere, whether in the field or at our desk.

The Online version of FastFigures is already in beta and works with an Internet connection on Windows, Macintosh, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm computers. And now, with the release of FastFigures Mobile, we release our first version of FastFigures that runs without an Internet connection on iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

I have to admit that I have been taken aback a bit by the loyalty some of customers feel towards our products. In the past few months, as we have been collecting names and email addresses for our new FastFigures Mobile for iPhone product, a number of very familiar names have been popping up. Some have followed us from platform to platform. Others have been using our stuff on Palm or Windows Mobile devices and are now moving to iPhone or iPod Touch and don’t want to go without us. I have even heard from more than a few that have been carrying around an old device to use specifically with our powerOne software!

There were plenty of opportunities to walk away from this. For goodness sake, Infinity was practically dead at one point before the idea of FastFigures came back to me and a couple of us who are crazy enough to not take better offers decided to rebuild.

And it’s not just customers. Another employee stuck it out with me, riding Infinity from it’s peak to its trough and then being stubborn enough to not give up. Plus the previous investor who believed in the business and me enough to lend a hand when we needed it most.

Since I only know a few of your names and you know who you are, thanks! I hope you realize how much it means to me.